Before I talk about LiveChat for your website, I wanted to mention the next Hats Club event. The event is November 14th at 4pm and will be hosted at Apex Business Advisors (the Darth Vader building at College and Metcalf.) I’m going to be on a panel talking about local businesses giving back to the community. It’s good timing because Thanksgiving will be right around the corner! Please consider coming to the event for networking, food, and hopefully some good conversation about giving back. For more info or to sign up, use this link. I would love to see you there!

LiveChat for your Website

I was working with my friends at Kenton Brothers recently, and one of the goals was to implement a chat feature on their website.

Kenton Brothers installs and supports commercial security systems… everything from key card locking hardware to video surveillance, turnstiles, and more. This involves a bunch of technology that has to work well together (they call it the security pyramid). And ongoing support is an important part of the security relationship. As a result, having an easy to use chat feature on their website became a priority.

David Strickland and I did some research and determined that LiveChat is one of the most popular and feature-rich chat systems available. The Kenton Brothers website is powered by WordPress, so we downloaded and installed the LiveChat plugin made for WordPress. We had it set up and configured in about an hour. And we were impressed. They’ve really thought of everything.

Hybrid 24/7 Support

Chat will be available on every page of the website in the lower right hand corner. (I say “will be” because they are doing internal training on using the chat support tools before turning it on. It should be up and running soon.) LiveChat is an intelligent system… in other words, it says “Chat” whenever Kenton Brothers staff is logged in and ready to take a chat request. If nobody is logged in, the chat box turns into a “Leave a Message” box. If someone leaves a message, it turns into a service ticket within the LiveChat system to be addressed the next time an employee logs in.

Canned Responses

The chat system is familiar, just like sending text messages on a phone. And from a support perspective, there are lots of bells and whistles that make it efficient for your team to use… including canned responses to common questions. You can set up canned responses with text and even links to pages or PDFs on your website for more information. This becomes really helpful if you get a lot of the same questions. And from a sales support perspective, it’s great because you can respond with links to product data sheets, pricing information, case studies and more without typing it all up every time.

Rating Surveys

Another nice feature is immediate feedback. Whenever a chat session is complete, you can ask for feedback. From a simple thumbs up or down graphic to a short list of quick yes/no questions (all configurable), you can see if your support is effective. And you can do so over time with the LiveChat reporting tools.

Integrations

And when I said they’ve thought of everything, that includes the little details like customizing the look of the chat window so the colors match your website perfectly. And there are plenty of integrations with other systems. For Kenton Brothers, we connected LiveChat with MailChimp so that people can opt-in to get the KB email newsletter. If a visitor checks the box, they are automatically added to the appropriate list in MailChimp. This works because the visitor has to provide their name and email to start a chat session. Once the chat is complete, a transcript of the chat is sent to the visitor’s email address. So you have their email address if they opt-in for your newsletter.

LiveChat is an excellent way to provide helpful support on your website for your clients and prospects. You need to be able to dedicate the resources internally to respond to those requests… But it seems to me that you would want to dedicate those resources to be responsive. And I think it makes a lasting first impression. Something good happens in our brains when we go to a website of a company that has real, live people ready to help with sales or support questions.

If adding chat to your website sounds interesting, be sure to check out LiveChat’s website for features and pricing. And no, this isn’t a sponsored blog post… I just really like their system!

https://www.bluegurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/LiveChat-Logo-web.jpg169275Jason Terryhttps://www.bluegurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/BluegurusLogo-FeedBlitz.pngJason Terry2018-11-01 06:00:322018-10-29 09:24:41LiveChat for your website... And don't miss the next Hats Club event!

Rob sent me an email telling me he was in “urgent” need of a new website. We got on the phone and I talked to him about our approach to web development…using WordPress and building the websites ON-SITE with our clients.

Rob said everything sounded great, asked me to send him a proposal, and let me know that he was ready to get going. He wanted to look at scheduling dates on the calendar and that’s when he told me “I need to get it done in the next 7-10 days!”

Say what? I guess we both had different expectations of what he actually meant when he said “urgent”.

That’s when I told Rob that I didn’t think there was any way for us to book a couple of web development days and get it done for him in such a short time frame. In fact, I told him he’d have a hard time finding anyone who could do a quality website that quickly.

Rob said that there were a couple of big events coming up and he needed the website up before he attended those events. I told him that I would talk to Jason and see what he thought, but told him that this probably wasn’t going to happen.

I had a good feeling about Rob (I learned he was born in Toronto, loves the Toronto Maple Leafs, and once spent the day with NFL Hall of Famer Roger Staubach) and I connected with Rob as a person during our phone conversations (and told him I love Canadians) and I really wanted to help him.

Mic and Rob, posing with PACE Sage pillows and the new website in the background! (Jason played the role of photographer)

So Jason and I got on the phone, looked at our calendars, and determined we could do a full web development day on Monday and move a couple of things on our calendars and do a second web development effort on Tuesday afternoon.

Yes, folks. You read that correctly. That’s 2 days. A new website in just 2 days.

I called Rob back and told him what we came up with and that it would be critical for him to come ready with his content (images, text, etc.).

My exact words (which I’ve said a million times over the years) were, “We know what we’re doing on our end. You have to come ready with your content. If you do, our process works like a machine.” Rob understood, agreed, signed the proposal (before ever meeting me) and we were on our way.

We met in his office on Monday, sat down like we always do, Jason downloading the WordPress theme (we’re huge fans of the ENFOLD theme), installing his favorite plugins and widgets, and me building the pages of the site, loading them up with text and images that Rob provided.

Click the image to see the new PACE Sage Capital website!

Along the way, we had some great conversation and Rob started to see that what I’d told him on the phone about the process working like a machine…which was exactly what was happening right before his eyes.

At the end of Day 1, I asked him “Rob, so what do you think? It works exactly like I told you it would, doesn’t it?” To which Rob replied, “You’ve exceeded my expectations.”

Those are the words we live to hear at Blue Gurus and it’s happened a lot over the last 8 years of helping companies in Kansas City with websites, LinkedIn Training and Blogging.

I’m not saying that to brag about it. I’m saying that because I’m extremely proud of it and we’ve worked very hard to build and nurture that reputation in Kansas City.

I told Rob that it’s very difficult for people, during the sales process, to understand how on-site web development works until they’ve actually experienced it with us. We’ve had more than one person tell us that they didn’t really believe it could be done. But we’ve done it countless times over the years and it’s the most efficient (and fun) way to do website development.

I asked Rob if he could share a few words about the experience. Here’s what he had to say:

Guys, you have blown me away with how cool this process was, and how much time and effort we saved by doing it this way. The product outcome exceeded my expectations, and I would highly recommend this approach to anyone in Kansas City thinking about a new website. My network was amazed by the site you created in such a short period of time. This has laid a solid foundation for us to professionally market our brand in a relatively new home base for our business.

If your company or someone you know needs a new website, email or call me at mic@bluegurus.com or 913-645-6650. I’d be happy to see if we can exceed their expectations.

https://www.bluegurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Rob-Shear.jpg800625Mic Johnsonhttps://www.bluegurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/BluegurusLogo-FeedBlitz.pngMic Johnson2017-03-21 17:32:012017-03-21 17:35:43A Referral, 3 Guys, and a Website Built in 2 Days

Have you ever been asked that question before? If you’re like most people, the answer is YES. But like most people, you probably don’t know (or care) much about the process, how much it costs, how long it takes, etc. That is, until you need a new website. And when that happens, what do you do?

We’ve Been Hearing These Horror Stories For The Last 7 Years

A person has a “friend” or a “friend of a friend” who builds websites on the side and a business owner pays $1,000-$1,500 to get one built. Then, a year or less later, the business owner is looking for someone to fix their site, their web hosting, etc. because that “friend” no longer builds websites or supports the websites they already built.

A website company/marketing group tries to sell a business owner a website and a bunch of other stuff they don’t need for $30,000+.

A person posts an update on Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter saying “Who do you know that builds websites in Kansas City?” and ends up with so many responses that they don’t even know where to begin.

A business owner tried to build a website using one of the “Free” platforms available and ended up wasting a bunch of time and effort to end up with something they aren’t proud of.

A business owner ends up talking to a few “web guys” and either makes a decision to go with the cheapest “web developer” or decides to spend more money than he/she really needs to.

The website project took weeks or months (we’ve even heard as long as A FREAKING YEAR), the process involved a ton of emails, phone calls, voice mails, texts, etc. and it was so painful that the business owner doesn’t want to have to think about updating their website ever again.

Here’s Why Blue Gurus Is Different

The majority of our website projects are finished in 2-3 business days, allowing you more time to focus on your business.

We exclusively use the WordPress platform, which powers around 25% of all websites on the internet.

We do the work ON-SITE with our clients. Yes, you read that correctly…ON-SITE. This collaborative approach allows our clients to speak into the process and see the website come to life as it’s being built.

Our pricing isn’t the cheapest and it’s not the most expensive. It’s a fair price for the value you get (Points #1, #2, #3, #5 and #6 = VALUE).

If we have extra time during our scheduled development days, we often throw in additional services at no charge to you.

We’ve had countless clients tell us how much FUN it is to work with us on their new website. Think about that. A process that’s normally painful becomes FUN. What a novel idea, right?

(Note: Because we do the work on-site, currently we only build sites for companies in the Kansas City Metro area. Additionally we don’t do “custom coding” where something is built into your website and interacts with a proprietary database, for example.)

Don’t Just Take Our Word For It

“Our experience with Blue Gurus was top notch! Jason and Mic do a fantastic job of complementing each other to understand and build the best website for their customers. Whether you are a small not for profit or a large public company, you will not be disappointed in the level of service Blue Gurus delivers!”

“Just wanted to let you all know how much we at Swope Health Services enjoyed working with you yesterday . It’s amazing what we were able to accomplish in just one day. You two have come up with a concept and website design process that is, in a word, magical. I can’t wait until our second and third working sessions. Thank you for what you do and what you are going to enable us to do as it relates to our social media brand. We are completely energized and excited by our partnership with Blue Gurus.”

“Just like I shared on my ONE DAY WEBSITE BUILD date….I have been a Blue Gurus Brand Advocate for 3-ish years, and I knew you guys were awesome. I just didn’t realize how awesome until I experienced the efficiency, innovation and creativity myself. I never would have been able to achieve the sharp professionalism that my BlueGurus Built site exudes by myself. Yeah, I could get something on the web for free…but it would have looked like free….and I am not running a business for free. And….I also knew your pricing was affordable for small/medium businesses, and boot-strapped startups…but I seriously thought it would require an investment at least double what I ended up investing. Thank you for being awesome friends. Thank you for delivering over and above what I imagined. Thank you for caring enough about your customers to create a high quality product. I will be telling everyone I know….Stop! Don’t let your Brother-in-Law build your website for free! Let Blue-Gurus do it and take a marrvy vacation instead with the savings!”

Are You Ready For A New Website?

Take a look at our portfolio any time. Click the link below to watch a video of us talking about our approach. And if it’s time to update your website, call or email me at 913-645-6650 or mic@bluegurus.com to see how we can help.

We recently completed a one-day website project for one of the most awesome people I know, who just launched her business called The Social Nurse (how cool is that name?).

Her name is Carol Bush. She recently sent both me and Jason the email below letting us know how she felt about the project…and all of the amazing things that have happened since the launch of her website and business.

We both agreed it was the nicest email we’ve ever received in the nearly 7 years we’ve been in business.

We wanted to share her email with you because this is exactly why we do what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for.

Simply put, Jason and I live for moments like this. It’s what gets us out of bed every morning, excited and energized to have an opportunity to help awesome people like Carol every single day…

“Holy freakin’ cow….the compliments on the quality of my new marrvy website have been amazing! From long-time nationally recognized nurse bloggers, no less!

The stats are so interesting. My awesome network is sharing across all social media platforms. Two days after my launch….I already received two invitations to speak at nursing conferences in 2016!!

The largest online community of oncology nurses picked up my Teach a Nurse to Tweet post and shared on their moderated LinkedIn group….which has…gasp! 10,000 members.

10 freaking thousand.

And this is only from my network sharing…I haven’t even individually scheduled a post to appear on any of my personal social media feeds yet!

Oh…and cool thing is that I have 10 new connections from small business owners in Kansas City metro. ROI, Baby!!!

In addition, Oncology Nursing News just asked to feature my posts in a print version of their publication. A bi-monthly, regular feature. The folks who are into print are who I want to reach. :)

Just like I shared on my ONE DAY WEBSITE BUILD date….I have been a Blue Gurus Brand Advocate for 3-ish years, and I knew you guys were awesome. I just didn’t realize how awesome until I experienced the efficiency, innovation and creativity myself.

I never would have been able to achieve the sharp professionalism that my BlueGurus Built site exudes by myself. Yeah, I could get something on the web for free…but it would have looked like free….and I am not running a business for free.

And….I also knew your pricing was affordable for small/medium businesses, and boot-strapped startups…but I seriously thought it would require an investment at least double what I ended up investing.

Thank you for being awesome friends. Thank you for delivering over and above what I imagined. Thank you for caring enough about your customers to create a high quality product.

I will be telling everyone I know….Stop! Don’t let your Brother-in-Law build your website for free! Let Blue-Gurus do it and take a marrvy vacation instead with the savings!

Hello friends! It’s time again for the weekly Blue Gurus blog post. This week, I wanted to share with you that we recently launched the new Apex Business Advisors website. I realized we hadn’t talked about our web development work in a while!

Doug Hubler is the President of Apex and we’ve been doing business together for years. He’s a close personal friend and I really wanted Doug to love his new website if we were going to help him create it.

He’s been following our blog updates for a long time now, and I know the one I wrote a couple of months ago about Google not liking you if your website isn’t mobile friendly really got his attention. Doug knew it was time to update his website and turned to us for help. He wanted his site to have a new look and feel. It needed to be mobile friendly. His staff needed to be able to update the content easily. WordPress is the right answer for all of these needs and more.

Did You Know?

Did you know that a typical web development project can take months with most companies? The fact that we do the work on site together allows us to be incredibly efficient. The new Apex Business Advisors website was built and launched in just three development days over the course of two weeks. For those of you that have been involved in other web development projects, you might be thinking, “No way.” But that’s exactly what happened.

The Team

Mic and I worked with Doug, his office manager Christi, and his daughter Chloe to build their new site.

Christi is more technical than most “office managers” and she was able to contribute so much to this project. Chloe is working at Apex over the summer and she’s a graphics designer. She was able to help with graphics for the website as well as the graphic header for their new email newsletter that goes out every week with Apex blog updates. Both Christi and Chloe helped move blog and business listing content from the old site to the new site and we had a great time working together.

The Result

Apex came to the table prepared to get things done. As a result, this project went smoothly and we even had time to set up a new email newsletter system. We used MailChimp and their RSS-to-Email feature that allows blog updates from the website to be pushed out automatically as an email to their newsletter subscribers. In other words, Apex creates a new blog post and the next day MailChimp sends a copy of it to their newsletter subscribers. Efficient!

If you are like me, you enjoy creating new things, but maybe aren’t a big fan of maintenance. The problem is, you’ve got to do maintenance on things or they fall apart. There are tons of analogies like maintaining your car or home. I’m sure you know people that don’t take care of their stuff, and when it breaks, it is expensive to fix. Even worse, it never breaks at a good time. Life is stressful enough without having to worry about your car breaking down on the way to an important client meeting.

The same care and attention is needed to maintain a WordPress powered website.

WordPress, Themes and Plugins…

Did you know that WordPress is made up of three major parts? The WordPress software itself, the Theme you choose that controls the look and feel of your site, and finally any Plugins that you install to give additional functionality to your site. These three elements go hand in hand to make your website look great and work well. It is important to keep all of these elements up to date.

1) The core WordPress software needs to be updated regularly

The core WordPress software has maintenance releases, security releases, and major releases that have new features. These releases happen regularly throughout the year. If you’re interested, you can see every release that has been done since WordPress began back in 2003 right here. What this means is that you need to be applying these updates on a monthly or quarterly schedule to keep up to date.

I know it sounds tedious to stay on top of these maintenance updates, but WordPress powers more than 20% of all the websites out there and because of that it’s a popular target for hackers. If they figure out a way to hack WordPress, they can hack a bunch of websites quickly, so they definitely focus on exploiting WordPress. That is why keeping the WordPress software up to date is really important.

We’ve said it before, and still love Flywheel for WordPress hosting. If you host your website with Flywheel, they do the core WordPress updates for you automatically, included in their monthly hosting fee! Just about all of our existing clients are hosted at Flywheel because they do the core updates, guarantee against getting hacked and more.

2) Themes need to be updated regularly

Themes have come a long way. Themes used to be fairly simple and cookie cutter looking. Today, themes are more of a framework that give you a ton of features, look amazing, save you time and hide a lot of the complexity of coding a website layout. Most themes are “responsive” out of the box… this means that your website will automagically change when viewed on a mobile device and be easy to navigate.

Themes are complex and have to be updated regularly to stay compatible with the core WordPress updates. For example, the most recent release of WordPress was a major release, version 4.0. In this version, the editor window for content has been updated to a newer version of TinyMCE. This update broke a lot of themes and made it so you couldn’t change content in pages or posts. Themes that are well supported by their designers will be updated to fix these kinds of problems, but the update has to be installed.

3) Plugins need to be updated regularly

Plugins are pieces of software that extend the functionality of WordPress. Say you wanted your website to have a calendar of events. WordPress doesn’t have something like that out of the box… but there are lots of plugins that can add that functionality to your website. One of the plugins we like is the Google Calendar Events plugin. This plugin lets you pull in upcoming events from a public Google Calendar. We like this because it lets our clients update a Google calendar with all their events and then they automatically show up on their website.

Plugins have to be updated regularly so that they are in sync with the core WordPress code. At times, major updates to the core WordPress code can break a plugin. Also, most plugin developers add new features fairly often, and you want to be able to take advantage of those features.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that WordPress is an amazing content management system for powering websites. WordPress is a combination of core software, themes and plugins that hide the complexity of website development from the end user. But with all good things, you have to keep WordPress, themes and plugins up to date and in sync so that they work properly and are secure from hacking.

https://www.bluegurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Maintenance.png254300Jason Terryhttps://www.bluegurus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/BluegurusLogo-FeedBlitz.pngJason Terry2014-10-08 11:04:352014-10-08 11:12:44Don't Get Hacked... Three Things You Should Know About WordPress Maintenance

1. Content Marketing for companies that need an accountability partner to help them successfully execute a monthly blogging strategy.

2. On-site web development where most of our projects are done in 2-4 full day sessions at our clients’ offices. (Yes, we actually come TO your office and build it there!)

3. LinkedIn Training for companies that want to better utilize LinkedIn for sales and sharing content.

Most people would agree that all of those things are essential (dare I say…critical?) for companies in today’s business world.

You want to share the stories about your business, your products and services, your people, and more.

You want a professional, easy-to-navigate web site.

And you want a professional LinkedIn profile that accurately represents who you are, what you do, and what you’ve accomplished in your career.

Can we all agree on that?

Ok, Now On To What’s Been Bothering Me

Throughout the better part of 2014 both Jason and I have had countless conversations with decision makers in Kansas City who know they need a new web site, who know they need help with LinkedIn, and who know that their company should be blogging.

We tell them what we do, how we do it, and how quickly we can get it all done. In fact, we’ve partnered with several businesses who had poor web sites, poor LinkedIn profiles, and no blogging strategy and had them cranking on all three in just a couple of months.

We explain this to every single prospect we talk to. It all makes complete sense to them. They get excited about it. They know it’s absolutely the right thing to do.

And then they go back to their office, get busy, and end up doing…..you guessed it…..

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

You Don’t Lose Weight By Thinking About Going To The Gym

I’ve used this analogy a lot lately to describe this phenomenon we’ve seen in 2014. Even though we all know it would be totally awesome, you don’t lose weight by thinking about going to the gym.

You only lose weight when you make the effort consistently to get up each day, get some cardio and weights in, and stay committed to it (and eating healthier of course) over the long haul. And some people do this by hiring a personal trainer. That’s very similar to how we work.

So here’s the deal….

1. Very few people are going to learn about all of the cool things that you, your team, and your company do unless you start REGULARLY sharing your stories.

2. Your web site won’t ever look better and be easier to navigate if you keep ignoring it, wait for it to go down, or wait for a client or prospect to tell you how bad it is.

3. Your LinkedIn profile won’t get better until you spend some time getting trained on what makes a good profile and learn how to more effectively use LinkedIn.

We’ve had people that have gone through painful web site projects in the past that describe the experience with Blue Gurus as “FUN”, and “EASY”, and “SIMPLE”.

We’ve had people go through LinkedIn training say “OH, I DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD DO THAT. IT ALL MAKES SENSE. I’M DEFINITELY GOING TO USE LINKEDIN MORE!”

We’ve had blogging clients say “THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST BUSINESS DECISIONS WE’VE EVER MADE.”

It’s not nearly as hard and painful as you think it is. And we’re here to help.

Email (mic@bluegurus.com) or call me (913-645-6650) today. Let’s work together to lose the dead business weight you’ve been carrying around for far too long.

Hi friends, it’s Jason. This week, I’m going to share the 5 things that web development companies don’t want you to know.

1) Web Hosting Doesn’t Cost $250 Per Month

I’ve talked to a lot of companies over the years who are paying their web development company hundreds of dollars per month for hosting their website. For the majority of businesses, this just isn’t necessary. Don’t get me wrong, if you have an eCommerce website with a lot of traffic, you might have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month for secure hosting.

That being said, most companies use their website to share information and have about 10-15 pages of content. About 23% of all websites are powered by WordPress. We choose to host all of our client websites at Flywheel for $30/month.

And we don’t mark it up… our clients pay Flywheel directly.

Other companies may try to justify a $250/month hosting fee by providing you monthly Google Analytics reports (which you can get for free) and the promise that they will update your content for you. But when you ask for updates to your website content, sometimes it may take several days for them to get it done.

Next time your business is wanting a new web site, consider WordPress to power it…and Flywheel to host it. The WordPress software is free and hosting at Flywheel is $30/month.

2) You Can Get A Good Logo For $300

If you go to a marketing company or professional graphics designer for a new logo, you will often see price tags in the $2,000 – $5,000 range for a small business with less than 100 employees. The most common complaint (besides price) that I hear about this is that you only get to see 2-3 logo concepts and then you get to choose one to modify enough until you like it. Ugh.

Another alternative, for around $300, is doing a logo contest at LogoMyWay.com. LogoMyWay is a worldwide community of graphics designers that compete in logo contests. The winner of the contest gets the prize money established by the company running the contest.

Usually, the contest prize amount is around $300, and you can expect to get between 40-60 logo designs from which to choose a winner. Many of the designers are from other countries where $300 will go a long way in their local economy. I’ve helped about a dozen companies use LogoMyWay for their logo and people have been happy with the results every time. You can check out current logo contests here. Read more

There’s a disturbing trend that’s been coming up in conversations I’ve had recently with clients and prospects. I wanted to share it in case it’s something that you or your business is suffering from.

I call it BRAND DISCONNECT.

It’s not a difficult concept to get your arms around, but it’s one I see time and time again. Let me give you the two most common examples:

1. You’re an awesome person. You’re passionate about the product or service you provide. You’re responsible. You’re helpful. You’re enthusiastic. You’re a connector. You’re the best salesperson in your company. People respect you and the work that you do. And on top of that, you’re humble and downplay your success.